Pricing and revenue management provider PROS has announced the launch of PROS Quote2Win for Salesforce, a newly enhanced solution designed to streamline the process of sales quoting, pricing, and discounting.

"In the past, salespeople would have a certain number of products that they sold for years and years," explains Patrick Schneidau, vice president of product marketing for PROS. "They knew their customers, their markets, and their products. You could rely on the experience of an individual salesperson to make pricing decisions."

But, as Schneidau points out, the cycle of business has sped up, resulting in a flurry of new products, increased competition, and customers that come and go more frequently than they did in the past. By using a quoting solution for sales effectiveness, a company can reduce the amount of time it takes to get an accurate quote out to a potential customer from when it receives a pricing request, the company claims.

"If there is a competitor who can get a quote out in a matter of hours versus days or weeks, from a customer standpoint, the difference is incredible," Schneidau says. "That's really where we're focusing our efforts—to help people be more responsive and agile with their customers."

Within the Quote2Win for Salesforce application, sales reps can add a product to a quote without searching for prices or having to copy and paste data from a spreadsheet into Salesforce.com. Quote2Win automatically brings up the account-specific price along with guidance on discounting, relevant promotions, and customer-specific sales intelligence.

"As we continue to grow and expand, we've seen a ton of interest coming from midmarket companies that want access to many of the same solutions [as enterprise customers]," Schneidau observes. "They're seeing that the processes they've established as a small company have outgrown them, and the complexity of their business has become so much that they need a better way to quote, to price, and to get offers out to the market."